These impacts are caused during all stages along the food production chain, although the most significant impacts occur early in the production chain (agriculture, food processing).
However, households influence these impacts through their choice of diet and habits, thus directly affecting the environment through food-related energy consumption and waste generation. Current consumption models do not only impact the environment, but can also have negative impacts on health, such as concerns about obesity.
For these reasons, reducing the ecological impacts related to food consumption was identified as a priority. This major challenge requires efforts at all phases of the food value chain.
The role of local actors is of major importance to promote more sustainable patterns of food consumption. Among the key determinants of changing food consumption, they can promote: a shift towards diets with lower consumption of meat and dairy products; a shift towards the consumption of more products from organic farming; and higher consumption of fresh, seasonal, and locally grown fruits and vegetables (reducing energy use during production, distribution, and storage).
In this context, the consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables was chosen as a part of food consumption as a whole in order to define ecological indicators of the most significant impacts.
French scientists have worked:
- to provide a conceptual framework on the purposes of ecological indicators of fruits and vegetable consumption (EIFVCs);
- to provide a methodological approach to select and measure the most relevant EIFVCs.
Considering the great diversity of ecological impacts, the large number of potential EIFVCs must be reduced to obtain fewer EIFVCs, but that are relevant at local scale. To be relevant, the EIFVCs must provide information on the three phases of consumption (acquisition, use, and disposal) and on the upstream and downstream phases of the consumption process; they should evaluate the more problematic ecological impacts at the local scale (level of concern); and they have to only point out the ecological impacts that households can significantly reduce through their consumption rates.
To measure relevant EIFVCs, three approaches must be combined: monitoring the ecological impacts, measuring the material and energy fluxes associated with household consumption, and analysing the consumer behaviours that result in the observed ecological impacts.
In BMA area, eleven EIFVCs resulted relevant.
The methodology used has allowed the most relevant EIFVCs to be identified and has highlighted the importance of combining three approaches (monitoring the ecological impacts, measuring the fluxes, and analysing consumer behaviours) in order to propose a dataset of the relevant EIFVC. The measuring of fluxes was possible for eight of them, whereas the monitoring of ecological impacts was only feasible for two of them.
Scientists conclude that this EIFVC dataset supplements other household sustainable consumption assessment tools, but its originality comes from three integrated aims:
- to first consider a great number of potential ecological impacts (fifty potential indicators);
- to point out the origins of ecological impacts, in terms of phases in the consumption process (five phases of the lifecycle of fruits and vegetables are considered: production and distribution, acquisition, used, disposal, and end of life);
- to consider the ecological impacts that households may reduce, rather than those that they generate by their consumption rates.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1470160X15002484
Source: Vincent Sennes, Sandrine Gombert-Courvoisier, Francis Ribeyre, 'Ecological indicators of fruit and vegetable consumption (EIFVCs): A case study', 2015, Ecological Indicators, Vol. 58, pages 152–160.
Contacts:
Vincent Sennes
Human Ecology, Institut Polytechnique de Bordeaux
France
Ph.: +33 556 846 925
Fax: +33 556 846 901
Email: vsennes@yahoo.fr